This article examines how BrexLit narrativizes a ‘Nazi complex’ embedded in British cultural memory through its literary representation of Brexit discourse. Rooted in traumatic recollections of Nazi authoritarianism, this complex combines a moral rejection of totalitarian violence with a latent reproduction of exclusionary Nazi logics, generating a paradox that BrexLit repeatedly interrogates. On one hand, novels represent Brexit-related tropes such as the ‘Fourth Reich’ and the ‘Kalergi Plan’, exposing how they recast the European Union as an oppressive force and Brexit as a moral act of resistance. On the other hand, these texts reveal how Brexit discourse itself, marked by the pursuit of racial purity, echoes the exclusionary logic of Nazi ‘blood and soil’ ideology. By situating such rhetoric within broader narrative contexts, BrexLit exposes how Brexit discourse reproduces the very authoritarian impulses it claims to oppose, thereby destabilizing its moral authority and historical legitimacy.
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